“We always hope to do something special with design,” he says, slightly riled. “Design isn’t compensation for the lack of something else. It should always be excellent. We’ll give the Alpina brand a nice, holistic launch soon, where it’s all explained. You just have to wait a bit longer.”
Turning to the large cars that are his most important remit, Missoni hits his stride. He is well aware of the depth of the big-car competition from other highly competent brands, and he notes a tendency among the traditional rivals, the European firms, to move further into luxury.
“I think that’s right,” he says. “We’re already seeing the democratisation of luxury across many brands through feature content. That’s happening in China, too. But I believe true luxury is becoming more and more a matter of storytelling and an understanding that heritage is something that builds trust over decades. I think we are only seeing the beginning of a renaissance of those values.”
The holy grail, of course, is to produce periodically cars that become icons, and BMW has a rich history of doing exactly that. Knowing what he now does of the company’s history, Missoni reckons he has isolated an important element of the recipe. I wonder if the original Neue Klasse saloon fits the bill, noting my own feelings of relief that BMW has been able to restate so effectively its own design values for the modern era.
“The cars people remember as classics come most often when the two main elements – design and technology – work well together. It’s rare for true classics to come at the very end of a run of incremental designs.
There has to be good reason for things to become iconic. Our job as designers is to be ‘pre-thinkers’, to propose new formats or dimensions and seek the technology to fill the void. If it’s there, we have the circumstances to create an icon.”
There is a strong case for the Neue Klasse cars, at least some of them, to be BMW classics, Missoni feels. “The car brings a big refocus on the essence of the brand,” he says. “At the same time it has an entirely new powertrain. The car’s proportions are very much driven by electrification, but at the same time the design focuses back on what BMW is all about.
